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Making Old Sound Recordings Audible Again

Posted by samzenpus on from the does-it-work-on-8-track dept.

orgelspieler writes "NPR is running a story on a safe way to reproduce sound from ancient phonographs that would otherwise be unplayable. The system, called IRENE, was installed in the Library of Congress last year. It can be used to replay records that are scratched, worn, broken, or just too fragile to play with a needle. It scans the groves optically and processes them into a sound file at speeds approaching real time. IRENE is great at removing pops and skips, but can add some hiss. Researchers are also working on a 3D model that is better at removing hiss."

1 of 172 comments (clear)

  1. Double-sided scanner by Limited+Vision · · Score: 0, Redundant

    I'd like to see a double-sided scanner.

    - slide in your LP, both sides get scanned simultaneously -- maybe two passes and a slightly different angle to get the benefit of 3-D
    - the software converts the grooves into mp3 / m4a, figures out where the tracks are
    - pings CDDB with the name of the album and artist to get the track names (while CDDB and vinyl is flaky due to the track length varying between the vinyl and CD versions, I'm sure you could constrain the search)
    - slide in the album cover, both images get scanned (and maybe use OCR to get the text, and perhaps even the track names...)

    Ta da, your records are in iTunes, tracks and album art. And the RIAA is livid. Everyone wins!